Category Archives: Creation

Ancient Cosmic Geography – the actual modern view #2

Posted on 02/06/2017 by Jon Garvey

Last time I described how Wayne Horowitz’s authoritative book on Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography has no room for the infinite abyss of waters so often claimed to lie above and below the world in “the ANE cosmology”. He stresses this in another passage: In Enuma Elish, KAR 307 and AO 8196, the highest level of heaven belongs to Anu. Elsewhere, this heaven is identified as the “Heaven of Anu” (šamȗ ša danim; šamȗ danim). Additional evidence that the Heaven of Anu is the highest heaven is found in The Gilgamesh Epic and The Erra Epic, In Gilg. XI 113-14, gods ascend to the Heaven of Anu in order to escape the … Continue reading →

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Ancient Cosmic Geography – the actual modern view #1

Posted on 01/06/2017 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been having a long, but mainly cordial, discussion on BioLogos on the old questions about whether Genesis 1 is really, as Peter Enns and, earlier, Paul H Seely maintain, teaching “old science” that is erroneous. Regular readers will know there are too many posts about that on The Hump to list easily. Why it even matters is well-expressed in a long article by Vern Poythress, to which I would add that, simply in principle, true interpretations lead to truer applications for life and so justify themselves. Poythress also has a couple of more detailed articles on specific issues here and here. Good stuff.

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Where are all the pagans in Genesis?

Posted on 25/05/2017 by Jon Garvey

Continuing my attempts to place the early chapters of Genesis within some historical context, I noticed for the first time this week that Genesis doesn’t mention any foreign gods at all in its fifty chapters. That seems remarkable to me, for I’ve never heard mention of it before, though it must undoubtedly have been noticed by someone over the last three thousand years. I look to the scholars to explain it.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology | 5 Comments

What a historic Eden means for understanding “goodness” in creation

Posted on 22/05/2017 by Jon Garvey

In a recent post I argued for the case that Genesis 2 intends us to take the garden of Eden as a real place set in geography and history. I want to take that idea a bit further, and draw some conclusions on what we are intended to understand about the “very good” nature of the Creation before the Fall.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Keeping on message

Posted on 18/05/2017 by Jon Garvey

There’s an election campaign on at the moment here, and it’s amusing how, whatever questions politicans are asked in an interview, they’ll make sure they get one of their chosen manifesto slogans or buzzwords into the answer. It’s laughably transparent, but presumably it works because we are all depressingly gullible. For light relief, my wife and I relaxed over a wildlife documentary last evening.

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Escaping the flannelgraph Bible world

Posted on 15/05/2017 by Jon Garvey

Over at “the other place” I’ve been in conversation with Richard Wright about divine action, and one of his points, all too common in the science-faith discussion, is that science has increasingly shown nature to operate through natural causes (and hence the accusations of invoking the “God of the Gaps” in any consideration of design). So divine action is to be sought (at least in Richard’s rather more positive view, compared to some others) in answered prayer, biblical miracles and so on, but not in nature.

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Creative power and oriental potentates

Posted on 08/05/2017 by Jon Garvey

This year’s BioLogos conference was addressed by N T Wright, and his talk was praised by Hump writer Sy Garte on his own website. A clip, basically showing that one might expect an evolutionary process if one sees Christ as the creative Logos of God, appeared later at BioLogos. You can see the four minute clip here.

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RNA editing – a squid pro quo?

Posted on 27/04/2017 by Jon Garvey

Yet another “unexpected” piece of news on evolution was carried by the Washington Post, though here’s a link to the version in The Independent. As you will see, it concerns the remarkable degree to which cephalopod mollusks like octopi recode their RNA for a number of important functions, including (as the relevant study shows) their nervous system. It appears that their proverbial intelligence is not in the genes, but in their editing (the article contrasts them with the Nautilus, a cephalopod that doesn’t recode, and doesn’t therefore predict election results, escape down pipes and so on).

Posted in Creation, Science | 8 Comments

Teleology and the extended evolutionary synthesis

Posted on 21/04/2017 by Jon Garvey

Jonathan Bartlett is an ID guy, but he has commented here, mainly because I mentioned favourably the conference he organised on Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism, which has now become a book that sounds well worth exploring. He recently did a podcast, available on YouTube, suggesting that the unifying theme behind the various disparate strands that make up what is called the “Extended Evoluionary Synthesis” is teleonomy.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

How did he do that?

Posted on 18/04/2017 by Jon Garvey

The commonest rejoinder to any design argument in nature, you will no doubt have noticed, is “Who’s the designer, then?” Although the ID reply is actually perfectly rational – that inference to design cannot, intrinsically, tell one the nature of the designer in detail – the question is in reality just an over-elaborate, if hackneyed, attempt to show that there is a hidden agenda of religion which, once uncovered, would render design unscientific in principle and, probably, a threat to the body politic. It’s Catch 22 – stick with methodological naturalism and design is deceitful creationism: mention God in reply to the question and it’s an illegitimate insertion into science.

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